


When she turns it is not with Grace.

by AcrylicMist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst and Feels, Canon-Typical Violence, Meteorstuck, Other, Regret, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Trolls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-18 18:22:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11296209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcrylicMist/pseuds/AcrylicMist
Summary: When she turns it is not with grace. The movement is too sharp, too angular, and desperate as the hand she sets on her cane.Across the hall, the shape unfolds itself from the shadows with the languid ease of grace if grace had been twisted and undone by madness. When he moves to stand at his full height, it is with a wakefulness that once she would never have known from him.One thing is the same. They’re both desperate.





	When she turns it is not with Grace.

When she turns it is not with grace. The movement is too sharp, too angular, and desperate as the hand she sets on her cane.

Across the hall, the shape unfolds itself from the shadows with the languid ease of grace if grace had been twisted and undone by madness. When he moves to stand at his full height, it is with a wakefulness that once she would never have known from him.

One thing is the same. They’re both desperate.

She can taste the indigo on her tongue from here, along with the murkier scents of olive and sweat. She hears those lungs fill, then empty in a pant. Her knuckles tighten on the handle of her cane and her throat feels full of grief. 

He steps closer, mingling confidence and instability into one. The drag of his fingers along the metal wall of the lab leave behind smears of blood.

“Look at that,” he speaks, and his voice is rough from disuse. He sounds nothing like the calm and strung-out wiggler she knew, and she can tell his eyes are blown wide and ragged. He brings his fingers up and streaks the blood across his own face. It mats in his snarls of hair. “A little miracle, waiting all lonesome and reckless in the dark.”

The threat is obvious, but she stopped caring long ago.

“Gamzee,” she said, a wisp of a girl in red and teal, something slim and insubstantial. She swallows hard past the lump in her throat. “I’ve been looking for you.”

He comes even closer, shoulders slouched, ambling like he too no longer cares. In a way, both of them have hit rock bottom. At the end of the universe existence condensed upon itself until there is nothing but the few feet of flooring between the two of them. He smelled sour, like grapes left to rot.

“Why’d you be up and doing that now?” Gamzee asked. No remark on his own intentions, no loose-skinned plea for mercy. Clearly sobriety hadn’t taken his mind from him, or the use of his hands. She’d been hoping to find him dulled and stupid, but his eyes were just as sharp as the slash of her mouth when she bared a fanged grin at him.

“The airvents pour your scent across the meteor,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It did not take me long to track you down.”

“But why?” he asked, his voice dropping into something sly as he purred, “Did you miss me, little Legislacerator? All tied up in your justice and your law, I thought you’d hunt me sooner.”

She did not back away. She was weary of running, but it’d taken her too long to realize it. Maybe if she had stopped running sooner, had put her foot down and a noose around Vriska’s neck sooner, none of this would have happened at all.

“You know,” she said,” Not everything I do revolves around juggalo clowns and their twisty ideas of God.”

Those eyes narrowed and purple colored his face. She did not sound calm; she sounded dead. The growl that rumbled from him was a feral thing that promised violence.

“Do you mock me, sister?”

She nearly sighed. If she said yes, he’d attack. She would fight back. She would lose and her blood would paint these walls. It was all too straight forward and she missed the intricacies of mental battle she’d once reveled in. She was too tired to care. 

“No,” she said, and now she smiled invitingly. Coy and vindictive. “Gamzee, I would never mock you.”

If he was intrigued he didn’t show it. The bait was all the better because it could have been true. The one thing Vriska never understood was that you could never manipulate with lies. It was truth that was a much harsher weapon. A good thing then, that there was no such thing as fair in this fight.

There was a part of her, small but persistent, that wanted her to step closer. To press her claws into his skin, to pull him close and taste where his pulse was the strongest. That part of her wanted to be hurt, to be ruined. She did hate him, after all. The delicious temptation to just give in thrummed below her skin when he reached out and cupped her face with fingers that still leaked with blood.

She let her eyelids flutter shut and imagined, just for a moment, that this coldness seeping through her bones was heat. That their hate could rip the sky black with miles until she tore something painful from the world that had crushed her. Balance the scales a little. So what if she was broken in the doing, as long as she hurt a little less while it lasted?

But she’d learned the hard way about hate. About suffering. And while the touch of Gamzee’s fingers did promise a staggering and wholesome suffering, she knew there was a more constructive way to apply her hate. 

She let herself be pulled close. Gamzee was a thing of pure unadulterated emotion. He hated and he raged and he murdered as he saw fit. And while this wasn’t as killing as crushing her skull, he knew it’d destroy her all the same when he pressed his mouth against hers.

She bit him immediately, and nearly snarled when he tried to pull his face away. He was a quick learner, and she felt his claws drag across her shoulders. The sudden scent of her own teal clotting under his claws focused her mind. She threw herself closer, reckless and starving.

Her hands met at the back of his neck, one tangled in the snarl of hair there. His mouth moved south and she felt teeth at her neck and across one thin collarbone. Her shoulders screamed with how hard he was holding them.

She gasped at the pain and his lips moved back to hers, smeared with her own blood. She licked it off of him as she snuck a small knife out of her sylladex. His pupils were black as pitch, and she hid the fizz of ozone and flash of light with a moan that had him snarling against her. Every line of his body was taunt as pulled wire, familiar and just as cutting.

She placed one hand at the nape of his neck again, pulling mercilessly at his hair until he obediently let his head fell back and left his throat open. She did not lean forward, did not set her teeth against his pulse and drag them downwards. Instead, she stabbed him squarely in the throat right over where she would have placed her lips. 

She ripped the knife across and they both went down.  
…

It was a long walk through the lab back to civilization. Her steps echoed. She lurched and swayed, her bloodied dragoncane leading the way. She left a thick trail behind her and ached in places unseen.

She paused beside a port and turned her blind eyes to the glass and the unknowable expanse behind it. She sniffed until she could smell the brilliant pinpricks of light scattered through the darkness, then she swallowed down her pain and her hurt and opened the door.

Sollux saw her first, drenched in indigo and teal and looking just as broken as she felt inside.

“Holy shit,” he said, red and blue jumping in the air around his horns. She didn’t turn to him. She could feel the swelling of tension in the room, the spike of alertness and fear as everyone turned to face her. She sought out where near-constant anger was replaced with worry, a burst of ungodly red with nubby horns.

She strode across the floor of the lab to where he sat without stopping, past where all of the cleaning couldn’t cover up the lingering smell of when everyone had died. Karkat stood up, his face tight with worry and fear.

He said just one word. “Terezi?” 

Something inside of her short-circuited at the sound of his voice. At the warble there, pain and regret and pity. She was covered in his moirail’s blood and shaking like a wire spitting off sparks. One touch, and she’d burn you to the ground. When she fell, it was not with grace.

She collapsed into his arms and pressed her face into the soft fabric of his shirt. When Karkat’s arms tightened protectively around her thin shoulders something in her heart was jarred loose and she was finally able to cry.

Outside, the stars rushed by.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wondered what would have happened if when Terezi tracked down our elusive juggalo it was not to start hate-snogging him.


End file.
